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Toronto holocaust centre to launch survivor testimony archive of more than 1,200 videos

Interviews, some dating back decades, have been digitized as part of a permanent project.

People visit the memorial site at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland in November 2014. Testimony from survivors of the infamous death camp are among the more than 1,200 recordings made in Canada that have been digitized in a permanent collection. (BARTOSZ SIEDLIK / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Wed., Sept. 28, 2016

In 1991, Paul Landau, a Holocaust survivor, sat down in front of a camera and recalled to an interviewer the time of greatest horror in his life, when he decided to escape a Nazi work camp following his brother’s death.

“To escape wasn’t easy. There was no way that you would escape from the camp,” said Landau, a Frenchman originally born in Poland. “You had all the Germans guarding you there that could shoot at you any time.”

Sure enough, Landau’s attempt was discovered and he’d later be deported to various other concentration camps, including Auschwitz. After surviving the Holocaust, he moved to Canada in 1951 and made Montreal his home.

Landau’s interview recording is one of 1,253 Canadian Holocaust survivor testimonies that have been digitized, fully indexed and will be accessible online as of Thursday. The Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto is set to launch its online collection of Canadian testimonies in partnership with the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.

“Some of the tapes are very powerful; they’re very emotional,” said Carson Phillips, the centre’s managing director. “People are talking about some very dark experiences of what they had lived through and survived.”

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The initiative revives a project that began in the late 1980s, when a group of Holocaust survivors in Canada sought to further Holocaust education and remembrance by recording audio and visual testimony.

More than 400 videos were recorded in Toronto at the time, but had since remained in a storage area for years because they were recorded on outdated technology, such as VHS tapes.

In 2012, the Canadian government reached out to Holocaust education centres across the country for ideas to honour the memory of survivors, in anticipation of its year-long term as chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance the following year.

The Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre consulted the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, which had collected 600 of its own survivor testimonies, and other similar organizations around Canada. Together, they had more than 1,200 recorded interviews. The federal government allocated $800,000 to digitize and preserve them for modern viewing.

Since then, digital archivists at the Shoah Foundation have listened to every tape in their entirety and manually indexed them based on keywords related to moments in the survivors’ interviews.

Phillips said he hopes the digital archive will help establish personal connections to historical events. He noted that for many of the survivors who participated in the project, it was the first time they had spoken about what happened to them and their families.

“Of the over 400 that were recorded in Toronto, some of these individuals did go on and become very involved in Holocaust education remembrance. They became regular speakers or volunteers at our centre,” he said.

“For many people, I think they were unable to continue to talk about it because the events were so painful.”

The videos are now part of the Shoah Foundation’s collection of nearly 53,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses from the Holocaust and other genocides, called the Visual History Archive. It is the largest archive of its kind in the world.

“With the number of (living) Holocaust survivors decreasing, we will have to rely upon recorded testimonies to fill in some of those experiences,” said Phillips. “It really serves as an incredible archive that future generations will be able to go into and they can search by a variety of experiences. It really engages the person, and young people in particular, to access survivor testimony that they may be particularly interested in, or experiences that they want to learn more about.”

The public can watch the launch of the Canadian Collection at 4600 Bathurst St. with a demonstration that begins Thursday at 11 a.m., or access the collection at specially designed kiosks at any time afterward.

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